Species, informatics and me

July 22, 2010

'ere I am (JH)

Man, I am so pleased with my new blog, I'm going to fill it up right now with a rubbish post on what I'm up to right now. Bear with me, people. This is going to be exciting.

Today is July 22, 2010. If all goes according to plan, by this time next year I will be enrolled in a graduate school programme, ideally a PhD programme, starting on a course of research which will stretch into 2015 and beyond. That's my next decade settled, more or less, if I can just get this started.

Why a PhD? To start off with, there's the job: long hours, yes; hard work, definitely. But also continually interesting stuff, with a lot of self-direction, and - a big win for me - the ability to create things to give away, be it software, data or content. Besides, the fields I'm interested in are really popping. The book of life is being compiled, on Wikipedia, on the Encyclopedia of Life, and in a dozen other places. A humongous amount of biodiversity data is being collected and stored and used. I'd hate to miss getting in on the ground floor of this - in a decade or two, the formats are going to solidify, the databases to be established, the toolset to be decided. Now is the time to really make something special here.

So that's my PhD dreams. With any luck, I'll have this website set up soon, and then it'll be time to e-mail people and see if they can come true. Until then, I reside in a lovely part of Paya Lebar, Singapore; I've got a great job at PaperTerminal, where I work on OCR Terminal and a handful of other projects across three programming languages, two operating systems, and a completely crazy number of ancillary tools.

So: life is good. Well, okay, maybe not that positive: life is satisfactory. Life is alright. And, with any luck, getting better all the time.

Dexter: Aww, thanks! Yes, we should definitely meet up: I haven't decided my exit date yet, but it looks likely that it'll either be towards the end of April or early May, so there's plenty of time yet. Look out for notifications and invitations towards mid April!